Blood Money (26 page)

Tasso nodded. “I’m not going to sit here and watch everything get all screwed up.”

Delfina went through the outer office and down in the elevator with the white-haired operator. It seemed to him that the temperature rose as he descended from floor to floor, until the lobby seemed like an oven. When the old man let him out, he closed the doors and the gate again. Delfina could see the little lights illuminating on the wall above the doors as he rose to the cooler floors.

Delfina walked to his car. He could barely touch the door handle without burning himself. He turned on the air-conditioning as high as it would go, rolled down the windows, and drove a few blocks before he closed them again.

When he reached his hotel room in the Vieux Carré, he saw that there was a fax waiting for him. He called Caporetto in Niagara Falls. “It’s me.”

“Sorry to bother you,” said Caporetto, “but there’s something new. We got a guy to pretend he was a cop and talk to the desk clerks at the hotel. The girl was really there. She checked in by herself, with her own credit card. Then, when she checked out, there was an older woman with her, who had them transfer the hotel bill to her card. But the girl had eaten
in the restaurant and charged it to her card, not the room. That’s why the charge stuck and we got it.”

“What’s the woman’s name?”

“Kathleen Hobbs,” said Caporetto.

“Did you run her?”

“Yeah. The card is real, but I think the woman may be a ringer. The card’s about five years old, but it looks like she doesn’t use it much. There’s nothing recent, and nothing major on the credit report, either. No mortgage, no car payment, nothing bought on time.”

“Of course she’s a ringer. Would you have put that bill under your real name?”

“No.”

Delfina began to pace his room, but the cord kept pulling him back to the desk. He looked down, and the flyers Tasso had given him were staring up at him. “Did you get her description?”

“Yeah. Tall—like five-nine—and thin—a hundred and twenty-five or thirty. Late twenties or early thirties and pretty, but not like a movie star. More like a dancer or something, lots of leg and kind of all elbows and sharp edges. Long black hair. Blue eyes.”

Delfina said, “Get an artist, the way the cops do. Have him work with each of the clerks separately until they both agree you’ve got a perfect likeness. Then get it out as fast as you can. Fax it to all of our guys.”

Delfina hung up and thought for a moment, then went to the folding stand by the wall and closed his suitcase. He just had time to catch his flight to San Diego.

D
elfina stood on the right side of the fairway, ninety yards out from the flag. The eighteenth green was a perfectly smooth oval sloping downward toward him. He looked back across the fairway toward the other men in his foursome, then prepared to wait while they took their shots from farther out.

Jim Flaherty was the cause of this outing. Delfina watched him run his pudgy pink fingers through the red-blond wavy hair above his perpetual sunburn, then stare into his golf bag to select a club as though this were the Masters. Flaherty was a conscientious golfer, but barely a city councilman at all. A few miles south of here in the city hall, the council was meeting right now. Flaherty wasn’t thinking about that. He was bent on digging his spiked shoes into the turf to get a better purchase for his swing.

Delfina knew that Flaherty had been born in a trailer park somewhere in a dry lake bed east of San Bernardino, but he had, as he put it, “bettered himself.” That meant that the bribes and inside deals he had were beginning to add up. Delfina didn’t resent his own investments in Flaherty, because Flaherty was sure to be around for a long time. He had shown a virtuosity in the weird language of local politics in this part of the country, which involved a wide vocabulary of coded statements about immigration of Mexicans and school prayer and a strong defense, all issues that local governments had nothing to do with. What Delfina did resent was that the inferiority complex about money that made him receptive also made him insist on talking business at places like golf courses and horse shows. Flaherty took a swing with what
looked to Delfina like a six- or seven-iron and landed on the green.

Delfina hated trudging around on a perfectly good day, sweating in the merciless southern California sunshine and even carrying his own golf bag, because neither he nor Flaherty could risk having a caddy overhear their conversation. He was glad that Flaherty was finally on the green, because it meant the ordeal was nearly over.

Delfina watched Mike Cirro, the young man he had brought with him on this trip. Cirro reached into his bag without appearing to consider one club superior to another, gripped it like a baseball bat, took a quick, choppy swing, and slapped the ball onto the hard, dry center of the fairway far in front of the green. But because he had hit it too hard with the wrong club, it bounced twice, rolled the last forty yards onto the green, and came to rest just above the cup.

Delfina shrugged and smiled at Flaherty, who seemed to be pondering questions of chance and the supernatural. Then they all waited for Pucci. He was the manager of the Parliament Park chain of grocery stores that Delfina owned, and Delfina was feeling good about him today. He had made Flaherty into a receptive listener by the second hole. At that point Flaherty could think of no reason why a supermarket couldn’t be built in Old Town, offhand, but he would need to check with a lot of interests before he could propose a zoning variance. The checking stage had only lasted until the tenth hole, when Cirro had handed Flaherty the envelope full of hundreds. Pucci feigned indecision and called to Flaherty to ask what club he should use. Delfina couldn’t hear the answer across the fairway, but whatever it was, Pucci nodded and hit the ball to the lower edge of the green.

Delfina had to be careful to keep Flaherty in a good mood until the game was over, or all of this butt-kissing would be wasted. He took his nine-iron and made a practice cut, then stared at the green. Next he gauged the distance to the sand trap in front of it, and expertly lofted his ball right into the center of it.

He good-naturedly shrugged his shoulders at Flaherty
and walked toward the trap. When he reached it, he studied the positions of his opponents’ balls on the green. Flaherty had left himself a ten-foot putt. Flaherty was certainly good enough to make it, but Delfina decided not to bet anything important on it. He took a bad cut at his ball and made it thump into the dirt at the edge of the trap to roll back and stop at his feet. Then he took a second shot onto the green and watched the others. Flaherty sunk his ball, and so did Cirro, but Pucci wisely took two putts to hole out. Delfina read the green carefully, swung his putter, and put himself out of his misery.

Flaherty was standing above him on the green, preparing to gloat. “Very nicely done,” he said.

“You’re still the winner,” said Delfina.

“Well, sure,” said Flaherty. “I warned you guys you weren’t going to stand a chance against Jimmy Flaherty on his home turf.”

“You were right,” said Delfina. His eyes leveled on the others, and they nodded and mumbled congratulations. He could tell that Pucci would have been more effusive, but he was as miserable and sweaty as Delfina. Cirro was young, and golf was an old man’s game. He seemed to be somewhere outside of the proceedings, waiting for something to actually happen.

As Flaherty and Delfina walked off the green, Delfina said quietly, “Do you know when we can count on having the zoning variance? We’d like to break ground in the fall.”

Flaherty winked. “I should have it for you in a week or two.” It seemed to occur to him that somewhere, either far away or nearby, there might be a microphone. He said loftily, “It’s always been my belief that a big part of my job was attracting business to the city—making it a friendly place to invest, and a good place to live and work.”

But his oratory was wasted, because his audience was distracted. Delfina’s glance around the nearby clubhouse grounds had shown him that two men were waiting for him. “There,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know it? I just get to the green, and there’s a couple of accountants waiting for me.” He caught
Pucci’s eye. “Why don’t you take Jim to the clubhouse for a drink? I’m the loser, so I’ll buy.” He shook Flaherty’s hand. “Jim, it’s been a pleasure.”

He left Pucci and Flaherty standing on the frog hair at the top of the green and headed for the parking lot. Before his cleats touched pavement, the two men he had spotted were hurrying across the terrace to meet him. One was Al Mino, an old Castiglione soldier he had placed in Oakland to oversee northern California.

Mino said, “We can wait if you want to stop in the clubhouse, Frank.”

Delfina said, “Who’s this?” as though he were deferring his answer until he knew who he was talking to.

Mino said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Frank. This is our friend Sam Zinni. I thought you two knew each other. He came to me in Oakland a year ago. Before that he was in … ”

“Illinois,” said Zinni. “I worked for DelaCroce.”

Delfina nodded. “I’m sorry, Sam. I thought you looked familiar, but I guess the damned sun is affecting me. Of course I remember you. The Maurice Black thing.”

Zinni smiled. “That’s right, Mr. Delfina.”

“Frank,” Delfina corrected him. “You’ve been around long enough to call me Frank, even if I don’t know it. What’s this about?”

Mino leaned closer. “That picture of the girl.”

“You got a car?”

“Right over here.”

Delfina turned to Cirro. “Mike, go put the clubs in your car and get me my shoes.”

He opened the back door of Mino’s car and sat with his feet out the open door until Cirro returned with his shoes, then put them on and tossed the golf shoes on the floor. “Okay, Al. Drive.”

When the car had pulled out of the clubhouse lot he said, “What about the picture? Has somebody seen Rita Shelford?”

Mino said, “I didn’t mean that girl. The other one. With the long black hair.”

“What about her?”

“I recognized her,” said Zinni. “It was from the Maurice Black thing. You remember, Black came into the Sporting Life. It was set up so Stolnick, the off-duty cop, was going to take him out to a car. He wouldn’t go, so Stolnick stuck him in the hallway by the telephones. This waitress, Nancy Carmody, saw it and took off.”

“You mean the picture looks like Nancy Carmody the waitress?”

Zinni shook his head. “No. It’s this other woman that came along later.”

“Another one?”

“Yeah,” said Zinni. “We caught up with Nancy Carmody at a camp. It was a bunch of fancy cabins just over the Wisconsin border in Lake Geneva. There were three of us: Jimmy McCormick, who’s supposed to be this all-star hit man from New Jersey, a buddy of his, and me to be sure the family is a satisfied customer. I tell the buddy to park down the road away from the place, send Jimmy through the woods to watch the cabin and make sure he likes everything, while I go make a phone call to DelaCroce and give him the news.”

Delfina was getting impatient. “What happened?”

“I get back like ten minutes later. I get the word, which is what I expected. Kill her there, bury her in the woods, and come home. I find McCormick and his buddy in the woods by the cabin. They’ve never seen her before, so they want me to look. It’s her. We can actually see her through the window. She’s wearing a red blouse and jeans and bright white sneakers, like she must have bought them that day because all she had when she ran was city clothes.”

Delfina knew he had to let Zinni tell it his own way, but he had just spent three hours walking across a reclaimed desert. “So?”

“So just when we’re ready to go in, she comes out. It seems she’s going for a walk in the woods. Okay, that’s fine. McCormick goes after her. The buddy and I follow at a slower pace, so we don’t sound like an army and scare her. We get a couple hundred feet down the path, and we hear a
car starting. If she’s gone for a walk, who’s starting the car? We run back, and there’s a woman wearing a red shirt behind the wheel as it heads down the gravel driveway. We run for McCormick. He says we made a mistake, because she’s still up ahead. He decides to do her right away, and runs. We do too. And there she is, about a hundred yards ahead: red shirt, white sneakers.

“She comes out of the woods onto a road. We try to catch up with her and get it over with before somebody drives up and sees her. Sure enough, a car zooms past us, pulls up to her, and stops. It’s Nancy Carmody’s car, with Nancy Carmody behind the wheel, still wearing her red shirt. We sprint to get close. This other woman opens the door of the car and just stands there, like she’s trying to get a good look at our faces. This doesn’t bother us, because she’s going to be dead too. But it also gives me a good look at her face. She gets in, slams the door, and takes off.

“We dash back to our car, and McCormick drives after them. We get maybe three miles before black smoke starts streaming out from under the hood, so you can barely see. McCormick jumps out and pops the hood. I get out too, but not because I want to put out a fire with my shirt. It’s because I see big orange flames. When I get to the front I can see them coming from the engine block and melting the wire bundle that runs along the side. There’s this white goop all over everything, and it burns high and hot.”

Delfina’s eyes were sharp as he stared at Zinni. “And you think the picture is the same woman—the one who slipped Nancy Carmody out?”

“I know it is,” Zinni asserted. “It’s her.”

Delfina was silent for a few seconds. For six years he had kept Nancy Carmody in the back of his mind, and other, newer problems had piled in on top. It was clear to him that he had not heard the whole story at the time. When the waitress had not turned up, he’d had Stolnick executed, so the immediate danger she represented had passed. “You know anything about this woman?”

“She’s got to be some kind of pro,” said Mino.

Delfina sighed. To these guys, the process of thought was like carrying big rocks to a river to use as stepping-stones. They would drop one in, then have to turn around and go all the way back to find the next one, carry it out, and drop it. “We’ll have to move fast.”